A Little Change of Face (22 page)

“That's all right,” he told her. “I think we've got it covered.”

Then Steve walked my mother to her car, saw her safely behind the wheel and returned, turning off the TV.

“Hey!” Mush objected.

“Hey!” Teenie brightened, seeing who it was. “The hunk is back!”

“I'm going to tell you two a story,” Steve said, “but first you have to get into your sleeping bags.”

“We're too old for stories,” said Mush.

“Shut
up,
” said Teenie, punching her brother before heeding Steve's words. “We don't even have to brush our teeth, so what are you complaining about?”

With visions of periodontal work later in life for Delta's kids dancing in my head, I sat down at the dining room table where the kids couldn't see me, but where I could still hear Steve spin whatever tale he was going to spin.

“This is a story,” started Steve, “about a painter and a librarian…”

“We don't know no painters,” objected Mush, yawning.

“Maybe you do,” said Steve, and he proceeded to spin a lovely tale, a tale that succeeded in putting Mush and Teenie, with their reliance on fear-based entertainment, to sleep; a tale that succeeded in showing me that he was seeing things in me that I certainly hoped were there, but that I'd never dared hope another human being would see in me. It was like being naked, in the best way possible.

“I think they're—” he started to whisper as I walked into view.

“Shh,” I said, reaching out my hand for his, “come on.”

I led him upstairs to my bedroom, feeling a disconcerting sense of déjà vu. This was so like the night with Saul on Halloween, but so different, too.

“Wait here,” I said, leaving him seated on the bed as I went to the bathroom, exchanged glasses for contacts. I didn't want the feel of even the glasses between us, but I also wanted to be able to see the man I was making love to.

He didn't remark on the change, just took my face in his hands, kissed me again.

“I've loved your eyes since the day I first saw you,” he said, looking deep into me, and there was that thing again: that amazing recognition of at once seeing the other person and being seen.

I let him pull my long dress up over my head, wanting
the moment to move faster, wanting to freeze the moment in time.

“Oh, Lettie,” he said, “I always knew that you'd be beautiful.”

And then I was being my most indelicate self, hurrying him out of his clothes because I'd always known, somewhere, that he was going to be beautiful, too.

I kissed my way down his body, hit my knees in front of him, feeling so…
grateful,
wanting to thank him for seeing me.

But he stopped me; my mouth having barely grazed his cock, he stopped me.

“No,” he said, pulling me to my feet. “I want you so bad, I'll probably come in an instant. If I do, I want to feel you around me.”

If I was another woman with another man, I might have been disappointed at the prospect of what I wanted so badly being over in an instant. But it wasn't like that. I loved what his words were telling me so much that I wanted it to be like he wanted it, him coming quickly inside me, waiting for the time to pass for him to become hard again, to do it much longer.

I lay down on the bed, spread my legs for him to enter me. Then:

“Shit
shit
SHIT!” I said, remembering all of a sudden who I was.

He stopped, pulling back.

“Um,” he said, “that's not exactly the response I was hoping—”

“You don't know who I
am,
” I said, punching myself in the forehead with my fist.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I'm the woman who never has condoms in her bedroom drawer,” I said, cursing myself, “that's who I am.”

He rolled over to the side of me on his back, striking himself in the forehead with his fist. “Shit
shit
SHIT!” he said.

“What—you, too?”

“Yes,” he spoke his frustration through gritted teeth. “I'm the guy who never keeps condoms in his wallet.”

I sought for a solution. “We could go out together to get some,” I suggested. But then I remembered the kids downstairs. Sure, they were sleeping now. But if they woke for a minute and discovered themselves to be unchaperoned, who knew what they might do? “Or you could go by yourself and I could stay here…”

“Shh,” he said, pulling my head onto his shoulder. “As much as I want to make love with you right now, I don't want to leave you right now even more.”

“Well, but we could at least—”

“Shh,” he said, stroking my hair. “I don't want the first time we're together to be anything but me inside of you with you around me. Shh, Lettie, we'll get another chance.”

You wouldn't think that two naked people, the sexual tension crackling all around them like an exploding fireworks factory, would be able to sleep, but eventually we did.

 

I awoke in the morning to rain striking the windows and an empty pillow, two sheets of paper laid on it, beside me.

Was I doomed, I wondered, to be the kind of woman that men easily left in the morning?

The top sheet was a letter:

I turned over the second sheet of paper, wondering what it could be.

It was a picture of me in profile, sleeping, done crudely with an unsharpened pencil. My short hair stood out at all angles and there were creases around my eyes that I usually tried to avoid looking at whenever I looked in the mirror. Somehow, under Steve's hand, those creases had become marks of achievement, something I'd won in a long battle, hard fought. My smile, in the sleep he'd captured, was warm and smart, my cheekbone lonely, aching to be touched.

At first, I didn't think I knew this woman, wasn't sure I wanted to, certainly not the lonely part, but then I recognized her and wondered how he had.

I felt conflicted, looking at that drawing, a swirling mixture of fear and wanting: wanting to be seen; fearing that, once seen, truly seen, I would no longer be loved.

K
nock-knock.

Knock-knock.

Knock-knock-KNOCK!—

The knocking, followed by abject surprise from me, who, having finally flung open the door to confront my impatient caller, was met with:

“Best Girlfriend!” I shouted as she dropped her backpack-in-place-of-a-suitcase at our feet, obviously sensing that she'd need both arms free to hug me back when I flung myself at her, which I of course did. In between my attempts to hang on to my trusty old life raft of sanity, I did my share of further exclaiming: “Oh, my God, ohmyGod, ohmy
God!
What are you
doing
here?”

“I came to save you from yourself,” she replied, slowly extricating herself from my death grip of a bear hug. As she took a step back, I could see that she was just as startlingly beautiful as she'd ever been. Some things never
changed, nor would they ever change, not as long as we two drew breath.

“Save me from myself?”

“Well, you never come out to see me.”

“True.”

“No matter where I happen to be living.”

“Also true.”

“No matter how great a place wherever I happen to be living might make as a travel destination for you, no matter how many weeks you get off a year, no matter how badly you need a change of place, no matter how badly you could use my help, no matter how screwed up your life—”

“Are we going to cover any new ground today, or are we just going to keep rehashing old territory?”

“Both,” she conceded.

“Excuse me, but my memory is failing now that I'm nearly as old as you were eight months ago, so refresh it for me. Just what exactly are you doing here, without a phone call first, without checking to see if I was available this weekend,
without any advance notice?
” Seeing the look on her face, I hastily added, “Not that I'm not the happiest person in the world to see you here right now, of course.”

“As I said before,” she took a deep breath, “I came to save you from yourself.”

“And, as I believe I asked before, save me from myself?”

She took my hands in hers and really looked at me, with that penetrating kind of depth that human beings rarely use on another, unless they're a Freudian analyst or they're playing parts in a movie about people falling in love and they're trying to simulate that look-deeply-into-each-other's-souls look that new lovers get at the dawning of love. This rarely happens in real life unless they're between the ages of pu
berty and legal drinking age, that penetrating seeing-and-being-seen that most people avoid due to—God, I hate using such a canned phrase, but it is true—intimacy issues.

I knew exactly what she was seeing with her pinning-the-bug-to-the-lepidopterist's-slide look.

She was seeing the hokey glasses, the unnecessary few pounds of weight gain that I'd only become aware of myself that morning in the shower, the unattended hair, the nonsexual clothing. But that wasn't all that she was seeing, for she was seeing past the careful packaging to the person underneath, the person whose core might still be essentially the same but who had allowed herself to change in some small ways to accommodate the package, in ways that were
wrong
somehow for the lack of conscious choice behind those changes.

I knew exactly what she was seeing, because through her eyes, for the first time, I was seeing myself.

“I came to save you from yourself,” she said one last time. “And from the looks of things—” she moved to embrace me again “—I came not a moment too soon.”

Which was the moment that Mush and Teenie chose to come bounding out of the kitchen, hurling themselves at our legs while shouting, “Mommy, Mommy! Who's the pretty lady you were hugging? Are you going to be a
lesbian
now?” Mush punctuated his enthusiasm by attempting to hump himself against Best Girlfriend's leg, the combination of his and his sister's behavior providing Best Girlfriend with game, set and match, as she scored the only point she really needed to make, the point she'd traveled across the entire country to make, changing planes four times.

My life had gotten too damned weird, even for me. Something had to give.

It was probably best to start with the small things. I looked at Mush and Teenie.

“What?” I said, sounding like an exasperated Borscht Belt comedian. “What's with the Mommy nonsense? First, you did it with Saul, then you did it with Steve, now you're doing it with Best Girlfriend.” I looked at Best Girlfriend. “I swear they're not my kids.” I turned back to Mush and Teenie. “What? Why are you doing this to me?”

I would not have believed it possible, for the no-neck monsters to blush in shame, but redden they did.

Mush studied his feet. “Mama put us up to it,” he said.

“Don't blame Mama.” Teenie roused herself out of the depths of embarrassment just long enough to punch her brother. “It was her friend Pam's idea.”

“Wait a second,” I said, not sure who to question first. “What do you mean it was Delta's idea, it was Pam's idea?”

“Well,” said Mush, “it sure wasn't T.B.'s idea.”

“No way,” said Teenie. “T.B. said it was a sucky idea.”

Even when you know that it's likely that your friends talk about you when you're not around, it's still a shocking and invasive feeling whenever you realize you were right, all your paranoid little fears coming home to roost.

But there was no time to be Woody Allen.

“What was the idea,” I asked, clarifying, “the idea that was Pam's idea and Delta's idea, but definitely not T.B.'s idea, no way?”

“Mama said—” Mush started, but Teenie punched him again.

“
Pam
said,” Teenie said, “that whenever anyone we never met was around you, that we was supposed to call you Mommy.”

“Did they say why they wanted you to do this?” I asked.

“They said it would be a lot of fun,” said Teenie, “seeing what would happen next if we did.”

“Nice friends you've got,” Best Girlfriend said.

“They're mostly okay,” I said, thinking that at least T.B. hadn't gone along with it.

On the one hand, it was hard to defend my friends' turning my life into a kind of sideshow. On the other hand, it was hard to criticize, seeing as how I'd turned my life into a pretty big sideshow all on my own.

Still, I was glad when Delta came by a little later to collect the kids. As much fun as we'd had together, I was tired of having fun.

“Did they behave nicely for you?” she asked nervously.

“Yes,
Mommy,
” I said. “They sure did.”

She looked at me funny, having caught my italics.

“I had a great time with Dave,” she said, very cautiously, “in case you're wondering.”

“That's great,” I said, and I actually meant it. “I'm glad.”

“I think I may have a chance with him,” she said, “you know, having him get to know me before introducing him to my kids.”

Sometimes, from the way they talked, it really was hard to believe that most of my friends were officers of the court.

“I'm really glad,” I said, still trying to feel it. Then:
“Mommy.”

On the second try, she got it.

“Oh, Scarlett, I'm sorry. We didn't mean nothin' by it. We just thought it'd be fun—”

“To play with the circumstances of Scarlett's life without her consent?” Best Girlfriend interrupted before I could say anything.

It was kind of weird, having my faraway Best Girlfriend, like, clash swords with my Bethel/Danbury life.

“Like I said,” said Delta, “we didn't mean nothin' by it.”

“No doubt,” said Best Girlfriend, arms crossed.

Instinctively, Delta seemed to sense that Best Girlfriend represented some kind of force that was bigger than her and Pam and even T.B. combined.

“You're the one from out of town, ain't you?” Delta said with a chin nod, like maybe Best Girlfriend was Gene Hackman in a saddle instead of an extraordinarily pretty woman currently living on the Oregon coast.

“Does that matter in the slightest?” Best Girlfriend asked.

Whether it mattered or not became immaterial, since Delta, deciding perhaps that Best Girlfriend was too big a force to reckon with on a Sunday morning, gathered up the kids and their sleeping bags and left.

 

Once Delta was gone, Best Girlfriend reached into her backpack, came out with two perfectly wrapped turkey sandwiches and two cans of Pepsi One, my favorite.

“The little place at the airport was open,” she said, offering one of the sandwiches. “I thought you might be hungry.”

I settled down on the couch—to hell with crumbs—suddenly realizing how hungry I was.

“What are you really doing here?” I asked, my mouth half full of food, not caring about manners in the not-caring-about-manners way that one can only be in front of a best friend.

“What the hell kind of greeting is that?”

“I didn't mean it that way. Of course I want you here. It's just that you've never visited me unannounced before.”

“It's like I said,” she said, also speaking around a mouthful of food. “I'm here to save you from yourself.”

“And?”

“And I'm in the middle of an existential crisis. Like I've been saying on the phone, I'm confused about my relationship, confused about my work. I thought that maybe in coming here to help you, I'd help me, too. Besides, one of the nice things about being a photographer is that I can write the whole trip off as work. I'll take a few snaps while I'm here, call it ‘The Bethel Series.'”

She reached into her backpack again, came out with a camera, snapped me sitting on the couch.

“I'll call it ‘Best Girlfriend Changes Her Face,'” she said.

“Great,” I said, wishing she'd given me some notice so I could wipe away the mustard I could feel on my cheek.

“Why don't you tell me what's been going on,” she said. “Give me a chance to help myself by taking care of you.”

So I told her everything, about the conversations I'd had with Pam that had led up to my making the changes, about Sarah, about Saul, about Steve, even a little bit about my conflicted feelings about my looks and how it all somehow related to my feelings for my mother and my feelings for her.

She used her tongue to work a piece of turkey loose from between her teeth.

“So,” she said, “this is somehow your mother's fault, or my fault?”

“No,” I said honestly, feeling the need to pull back from the hurt look on her face, but wanting to still be honest, “it just
is.
I'm just telling you what some of the antecedents and aftershocks are. I know that no one made me pull the trigger.”

“You know what I think?”

“No, but I bet you'll tell me.”

“I think Saul sounds like a toad and Steve sounds like a prince.”

“Maybe.”

“And I think something else.”

“Hmm?”

“I think that what you should really do, Scarlett, what you should really-really finally do, is be yourself.”

“Be yourself”—two throwaway words, like something you'd see in a high school yearbook alongside “don't ever change” and “friends 4 ever.” Two simple words, which were in essence the two words I'd really been saying to Sarah with my longer-winded exhortation to focus on her positive attributes, designed to put people at their ease; in reality, two of the most fear-provoking words in the English language.

Well, they certainly struck terror in me.

“I also think you should tell Steve everything,” said Best Girlfriend. “If he really is falling in love with you, if he's fallen in love with you, you should give him the chance to see who you really are.”

“We'll see.”